On a Friday night a few months ago, a group of us hit up the opening for Billy Apple's "The Bruce and Denny Show" at
Brett McDowell Gallery. I should make it clear here, in case you don't know me, that I'm seriously not into sports. I'm
almost anti-sport. But from my childhood, Formula 1 has demanded a different sort of respect from me….
And as for art by a world-renowned New Zealand pop artist, combined with the one sport I've found tolerable, let alone enjoyed? This certainly set the exhibition up to be an interesting one.
Apple used the gallery space nicely. Three works based around Bruce McLaren faced three Denny Hulme works on the opposite wall, the middle space projecting their race and victory footage from the 60's. I would dare say 'that was about it', but for me what proved incredibly interesting was that the best label for this body of work was 'pop art'. The reason for my interest here lies in the fact that the imagery was actually from 50-odd years ago, yet the art itself was recently created. Billy Apple had here used iconography which would suit the New Zealand pop consciousness decades ago but is now more of a retro image. Because of the connotations of its very name, Pop Art should (in my mind) be of a contemporary concern when it's made. Yet still, the best label I can find for Apple's retrospective art here is still pop - perhaps signifying to some extent an inherent ridiculousness in some elements of Art History and theory - that a work can be described in a certain way purely because we have no way of describing what it really represents. Regardless, it was interesting to see this exhibition using a sporting subject other than rugby as our country started going crazy over this looming, primitive display of masculinity and anti-intellectuality.
Talking to Billy was an amazing experience, and thanks to my naivety, not what I expected. One thing I must first say is that, having been a contemporary of Andy Warhol's, I'm damn impressed he still turns up to his own shows! He had little to say on the meaning of this particular exhibition - it transpires that to Billy the exhibition is merely a display of his interest in vintage motor sports, a continuation of his famous exhibition which involved painting up a vintage McLaren Formula One car with the technicolor rainbow of past Apple computer logos. In fact, he came across as an artist who is extremely and primarily concerned with the idea of intellectual property and copyright. His use of the vintage McLaren logo was direct bait for the now British-owned company - although no longer in use, they still own the copyright and aren't particularly happy with him. This is another continuation of his pre-existing activities as an artist; back when he was first operating under the pseudonym Billy Apple, he had constant problems with the Apples of Steve Jobs and Paul McCartney. To be honest, I found Apple a bit difficult as a person, but the wonder of chatting to someone with such a legacy is undeniable. Plus, it was cool that he had a bottomless bag of pamphlets to help explain anything we asked him!
Now, to further the sports theme becoming apparent in Dunedin - about a week later I went to the opening of "Art vs. Rugby" at the Blue Oyster Art Project Space. First and foremost - I still maintain that I intensely dislike rugby. Yet the three artists in this combined exhibition create perfectly sound ideas. I'll primarily deal here with my favorite - James Oram's commentary on the media's role in sports in our country.
Oram's work consisted of three elements - a mirror with a mouthguard stuck to it, a slow-motion video of a handshake, and a sportsman's portrait covered by RGB stripes. The latter I found particularly interesting. By masking the player with RGB stripes it was profoundly stating that the people you feel you know through the RGB pixels of your TV are in fact masked by it. They're performers and you don't know them at all, no matter how well you feel they're portrayed and how well you know their game skills. The mirror and mouthguard built on top of this in a way - are players protecting themselves from the mirror of media reflection/representation? Do they guard their mouths and moves carefully enough to have some sense of normality and personality on the other side of the mirror? Lastly, the slow-motion handshake was a sensual, moving and homo-erotic commentary on masculinity. Subverting slow-mo action replays showed the hands each slide over and massage the other oh-so tenderly and lovingly.
Holding the middle ground in my preference was Edith Amituanai’s photography. Featuring two youth facing off across the gallery, her work showed the competitivity implied in the exhibition's name. The backdrop was a typical small-town rugby field and as such she showed the community importance of having a collective past-time such as rugby. Particularly appealing also was that her photography itself was quite beautiful.
Some of the other works were, ideologically, a little depressing to me - Scott Eady's 15 black pillars holding up the gallery roof to suggest that the All Blacks are the pillars of our country, and his photos showing kids dressed up in rugby gear. But having said that, I guess he's speaking a truth. In New Zealand we really
are brought up to be rugby heads, even if I wish I could disagree with that. So as frustrating as they may be, these works were really just a commentary on stereotypical New Zealand life.
Having found positives in the ideas of Blue Oyster's "Art vs Rugby", and appreciating Billy Apple's "Retro Art", I still remain critical of the few remaining intellectual spaces in our meat-headed country - that is, art galleries - succumbing to sports-related art. I accept that sport is an important part of our culture for most people - just as art is for me. But when I was in Wellington for a day to chat to gallery owners about a web start-up I'm working on, I even noticed that the lawn next to Civic Square has this huge, hideous (and apparently permanent) metal sculpture of rugby players. Personally, if I was inclined to travel around the world to watch the rugby (or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time), and I went in pursuit of a bit of an intellectual sanity-hunting escape, the very last thing I'd want to find in the safe-haven of an art gallery is work about fucking rugby. Just saying.
